He later made a cameo on the show of the same name and won a million dollars on "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?", proving decisively that he was by obliterating the little brat in the process, perhaps his proudest moment. OK, I made that last part up. You never know.
RIP many, many Smoots away!!

After earning an MIT PhD himself, he became a postdoc researcher under the legendary Luis Alvarez at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He went on to study the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background, not Color Me Badd) using satellites to confirm the Big Bang Theory, for which he won the Nobel Prize.